Causes of Language Change

Economy: Speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient and effective as possible to
reach communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs
and benefits.
o The principle of least effort tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms.
See vowel reduction, cluster reduction, lenition, and elision. After some time a
change may become widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and
may end up treated as a standard. For instance: going to [o..t] gonna
[n] or [n], with examples of both vowel reduction [] [] and elision
[nt] [n], [o.] [].

Analogy: reducing word forms by likening different forms of the word to the root.

Language contact: borrowing of words and constructions from other languages.[1]

Geographic separation: when people move away from each other, their language will
diverge, at least for the vocabulary, due to different experiences.[2]

Cultural environment: Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and objects
in their language, whether they encounter different people there or not.

Migration/Movement: Speakers will change and create languages, such as pidgins and
creoles.[3]

Imperfect learning: According to one view, children regularly learn the adult forms
imperfectly, and the changed forms then turn into a new standard. Alternatively, imperfect
learning occurs regularly in one part of society, such as an immigrant group, where the
minority language forms a substratum, and the changed forms can ultimately influences
majority usage.[2]

Social prestige: Language may not only change towards a prestigious accent, but also
away from one with negative prestige,[2] as in the case of rhoticity of Received
Pronunciation.[4] Such movements can go back and forward.[5]

According to Guy Deutscher, the tricky question is "Why are changes not brought up short and
stopped in their tracks? At first sight, there seem to be all the reasons in the world why society
should never let the changes through." He sees the reason for tolerating change in the fact that
we already are used to "synchronic variation", to the extent that we are hardly aware of it. For
example, when we hear the word "wicked", we automatically interpret it as either "evil" or
"wonderful", depending on whether it is uttered by an elderly lady or a teenager. Deutscher
speculates that "[i]n a hundred years' time, when the original meaning of 'wicked' has all but

been forgotten, people may wonder how it was ever possible for a word meaning 'evil' to change
its sense to 'wonderful' so quickly."
Types of language change

All languages change continually,[7] and do so in many and varied ways.

Marcel Cohen details various types of language change under the overall headings of the
external evolution[8] and internal evolution of languages.[9]
Lexical changes

The study of lexical changes forms the diachronic portion of the science of onomasiology.
The ongoing influx of new words into the English language (for example) helps make it a rich
field for investigation into language change, despite the difficulty of defining precisely and
accurately the vocabulary available to speakers of English. Throughout its history English has
not only borrowed words from other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create
new meanings, whilst losing some old words.
Dictionary-writers try to keep track of the changes in languages by recording (and, ideally,
dating) the appearance in a language of new words, or of new usages for existing words. By the
same token, they may tag some words eventually as "archaic" or "obsolete".
Phonetic and phonological changes
Main articles: Sound change and Phonological change

The concept of sound change covers both phonetic and phonological developments.
The sociolinguist William Labov recorded the change in pronunciation in a relatively short
period in the American resort of Martha's Vineyard and showed how this resulted from social
tensions and processes.[10] Even in the relatively short time that broadcast media have recorded
their work, one can observe the difference between the pronunciation of the newsreaders of the
1940s and the 1950s and the pronunciation of today. The greater acceptance and fashionability of
regional accents in media may[original research?] also reflect a more democratic, less formal society
compare the widespread adoption of language policies.
The mapping and recording of small-scale phonological changes poses difficulties, especially as
the practical technology of sound recording dates only from the 19th century. Written texts
provide the main (indirect) evidence of how language sounds have changed over the centuries.
But note Ferdinand de Saussure's work on postulating the existence and disappearance of
laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European as an example of other methods of detecting/reconstructing
sound-changes within historical linguistics. Poetic devices such as rhyme and rhythm may
provide clues to previous phonological habits.

Spelling changes

Standardisation of spelling originated relatively recently.[citation needed] Differences in spelling often

catch the eye of a reader of a text from a previous century. The pre-print era had fewer literate
people: languages lacked fixed systems of orthography, and the handwritten manuscripts that
survive often show words spelled according to regional pronunciation and to personal
preference.
Semantic changes
Main article: Semantic change

Semantic changes are shifts in the meanings of existing words. Basic types of semantic change
include:

pejoration, in which a term's connotations become more negative

amelioration, in which a term's connotations become more positive

broadening, in which a term acquires additional potential uses

narrowing, in which a term's potential uses are restricted

After a word enters a language, its meaning can change as through a shift in the valence of its
connotations. As an example, when "villain" entered English it meant 'peasant' or 'farmhand', but
acquired the connotation 'low-born' or 'scoundrel', and today only the negative use survives. Thus
'villain' has undergone pejoration. Conversely, the word "wicked" is undergoing amelioration in
colloquial contexts, shifting from its original sense of 'evil', to the much more positive one as of
2009 of 'brilliant'.
Words' meanings may also change in terms of the breadth of their semantic domain. Narrowing a
word limits its alternative meanings, whereas broadening associates new meanings with it. For
example, "hound" (Old English hund) once referred to any dog, whereas in modern English it
denotes only a particular type of canid. On the other hand, the word "dog" has been broadened
from its Old English root 'dogge', the name of a particular breed, to become the general term for
all canines.[11]
Syntactic change
Main article: Syntactic change

Syntactic change is the evolution of the syntactic structure of a natural language.

Over time, syntactic change is the greatest modifier of a particular language. Massive changes attributable either to creolization or to relexification - may occur both in syntax and in
vocabulary.

Sociolinguistics and language change

The sociolinguist Jennifer Coates, following William Labov, describes linguistic change as
occurring in the context of linguistic heterogeneity. She explains that [l]inguistic change can be
said to have taken place when a new linguistic form, used by some sub-group within a speech
community, is adopted by other members of that community and accepted as the norm.[12]
Can and Patton (2010) provide a quantitative analysis of twentieth century Turkish literature
using forty novels of forty authors. Using weighted least squares regression and a sliding
window approach, they show that, as time passes, words, in terms of both tokens (in text) and
types (in vocabulary), have become longer. They indicate that the increase in word lengths with
time can be attributed to the government-initiated language reform of the 20th century. This
reform aimed at replacing foreign words used in Turkish, especially Arabic- and Persian-based
words (since they were in majority when the reform was initiated in early 1930s), with newly
coined pure Turkish neologisms created by adding suffixes to Turkish word stems (Lewis, 1999).
Can and Patton (2010), based on their observations of the change of a specific word use (more
specifically in newer works the preference of ama over fakat, both borrowed from Arabic and
meaning 'but', and their inverse usage correlation is statistically significant), also speculate that
the word length increase can influence the common word choice preferences of authors.
Quantifying language change

Altintas, Can, and Patton (2007) introduce a systematic approach to language change
quantification by studying unconsciously-used language features in time-separated parallel
translations. For this purpose, they use objective style markers such as vocabulary richness and
lengths of words, word stems and suffixes, and employ statistical methods to measure their
changes over time.
Language shift and social status
Main article: Language shift

Languages perceived to be "higher status" stabilise or spread at the expense of other languages
perceived by their own speakers to be "lower-status".
Historical examples are the early Welsh and Lutheran bible translations, leading to the liturgical
languages Welsh and High German thriving today, unlike other Celtic or German variants.[13]
For prehistory, Forster and Renfrew (2011)[14] argue that in some cases there is a correlation of
language change with intrusive male Y chromosomes but not with female mtDNA. They then
speculate that technological innovation (transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, or from
stone to metal tools) or military prowess (as in the abduction of British women by Vikings to

Iceland) causes immigration of at least some males, and perceived status change. Then, in mixedlanguage marriages with these males, prehistoric women would often have chosen to transmit the
"higher-status" spouse's language to their children, yielding the language/Y-chromosome
correlation seen today.